Show White (2025) Review: Neither Daring nor Safe Enough

Snow White (2025) doesn’t leave you Happy, Bashful, Dopey, or Grumpy, but just confused by its indecisiveness between sending its own message and recreating the original tale.

Afterwards, she runs into the seven dwarves from the original tale as well as a young thief Jonathan (Andrew Burnap, of The Front Room). Together, they try to survive the Queen’s pursuit and hopefully recover the kingdom.

The first thing I immediately want to point out is that this film is a complete visual mess. Aside from the distracting anime eyes of the animals, or the seven dwarves looking like glossy puppets, the costuming for this movie just doesn’t work. Sensibilities in animation isn’t the same as live action, and bringing the hairdo or the yellow dress perfectly over from live action without any touches to make it fit in better in real life just leaves Snow White looking like she is going to a low budget Halloween party with a forehead wide enough to host the Super Bowl in.

Speaking of the titular Snow White, Zegler plays things disappointingly safe. There’s nothing grating about it, but she also doesn’t show too much range in her emotions, or have standout moments where she gets to express her character to the audience. This also extends to when she starts singing in the film’s multiple musical numbers. Zegler’s songs are nice to listen to, but they’re pleasant in a purely musical sense where I’d play it in the background while writing. Good musical performances come from being able to “hear” actors’ emotions through their voices, expressions, or body movements, but Zegler is lacking in that department.

The actual letdown, however, comes from the Queen. I was excited to hear Gadot was cast in the role, but her performance is neither menacing enough to be villainous nor hammy enough to be entertaining. When she screams “NO” to the mirror after hearing Snow White is fairer or berating the huntsman for not killing Snow White, she comes off less as a threatening villainess consumed by envy and more like a whiny high schooler who wants to remain as the prom beauty queen.

Yet the visuals or the main protagonist and antagonist don’t compare to this film’s biggest issue: commitment, or lack thereof. And for this, we actually need to look at the original animated film as well. It’s no secret that in recent years, there have been attempts at breaking Disney princesses out of their past mold, where they were seen as too passive. This has had varying degrees of success, but the point is, Snow White has also had its cast and crew claiming to go in similar directions, talking of changing things so that Snow White no longer had to wait around for a prince to save her, and for her to take initiative.

How much of that agenda actually came through, we have no way of knowing, but I think it’s not unreasonable to say that is the reason why there is no prince in this film, but instead we have Jonathan and his bandit crew. The film tries to devote some time to him and how he represents the normal people struggling to survive day to day, as well as how Snow White can motivate them to stand. At least, that’s what I think the movie is saying, because the truth is, the story barely dwells on them, giving us only caricature versions of their personalities. I know one of them has a fetish for crossbows and that’s as far as I remember.

This is because the bandit crew – the part that would seem to represent the film’s attempts at making Snow White a more independent figure – is constantly fighting for screentime alongside the seven dwarves. Here’s where the story sticks more closely to the original, and tries to recreate the same whimsical, fairy tale feeling, with Snow White singing a cleaning song with the dwarves. In other words, the movie is constantly swaying between trying to tell something more faithful to the animated film and trying to make Snow White into an active protagonist. Its two stories and their two corresponding casts clash against each other and neither ends up feeling like they have enough depth.

The botched duality, like trying to mix gasoline and milk together to make beer, is also detrimental to the character of Snow White. As I said, the film tries to give her more of an active role, where she makes objectives for herself other than surviving, such as finding her lost father or reclaiming the kingdom from the Queen – characteristics that belong to a more mature, grounded protagonist. Yet, because she also needs to have those fairy tale moments, she ends up getting the worst of both worlds, talking big one moment and yet coming off as hopelessly naive the next. After all, what sort of smart, active protagonist would still get fooled by a creepy old lady with an apple?

This hits the peak in the film’s ending, and here’s where I’m going to go into explicit spoilers, so avoid the next two paragraphs if you want to go into this blind. Instead of the Queen falling off a cliff to her demise like in the 1937 film, here Snow White ends up going to the castle to confront the Queen directly. Yet her method of uprising against the tyrannical rule amounts to her simply walking into the town square and hoping that people are still kind-hearted enough to follow her.

Now, I’m not opposed to kindness being the answer to a problem. But whether this sort of approach actually works depends on the sort of world the story is in. We never got to know this movie’s setting that well, as there’s virtually no time devoted to the townsfolk outside of one festival in the beginning. Are the people more idealistic like in fairy tales? Or are they more complex and cynical like in the real world? We don’t know, so Snow White’s victory through her Gandhi movement isn’t very convincing.

I usually am of the stance that adaptations should be given a fair chance on their own merits, but in this case, I believe the producers’ approach to the 1937 film to be the major cause of this issue. This tonal dysfunction is distracting whether you view Snow White as an adaptation or as its own product. It’s just that if you do view it as an adaptation of a beloved classic, it hurts your soul even more.

Snow White’s just content to rest on the laurels of its original animated counterpart while intermittently waving its hands and shouting, “we didn’t forget to be different!” But because of how utterly incongruous its direction is, it just ends up being a very confusing experience no matter your expectations. In a way, it’s pitifully ironic for the remake of the animated film that showcased Disney’s talent and creativity to the world to end up being so bland.

Snow White (2025) is out now in US theatres, in UK & Irish cinemas, and globally in theaters.